This article guides you through the process of increasing the size of a virtual disk for a Mac OS virtual machine.

Symptoms:

• A VMware Fusion virtual machine does not power on
• Taking a snapshot fails
• Suspending the virtual machine fails
• You see errors similar to these:
  • Not enough physical memory is available to power on this virtual machine with its configured settings.
  • The file system upon which <virtual machine path and name> resides is critically low on free space. Allowing this virtual machine to continue may cause it to fail unexpectedly.

VMware Fusion 11.x
VMware Fusion 10.x
VMware Fusion Pro 10.x
VMware Fusion Pro 12.x
VMware Fusion 12.x
VMware Fusion Pro 11.x

Note: Please Take a Backup of the Virtual Machine before you proceed with the further steps: To back up a virtual machine in Fusion

How to add the disk space on the VMware Fusion.

1. Open Fusion.
2. Select the virtual machine in the Virtual Machine Library.
3. Go to Fusion Menu > Virtual Machine > Settings
4. Click Hard Disk(s).
5. Use the slider to adjust the size of the virtual disk.
6. Click Apply.

Note: Ensure that you have enough free space available on the physical disk to perform the operation. The free disk required is equal to the current.vmdk size. For example: If the vmdk is 20GB in size and you want to increase it to 30GB (a 10GB increase), you will require 20GB + 10GB free space on the physical disk.

To increase the size of the disk partition in Mac OS X:

1. Click on the Finder icon from the dock.
2. Locate and click to open Applications within the left pane of the Finder window. This is usually above the user's home folder Icon.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the Applications window to locate and click to and open Utilities.
4. Locate and click to open Disk Utility.
5. Choose View > Show All Devices (if available) from the menu bar or toolbar in Disk Utility.

6.  In the sidebar, select the volume you want to resize, then select Partition.
7. Select Partition from the pop-up window

8.  Select "Free Space" between the two resulting partitions from the pie chart and hit "-" sign from the bottom left

Note: Depending on the operating system installed on your Mac, three file system formats are available: APFS, which is used by macOS High Sierra (10.13) and later operating systems; Mac OS Extended, used by macOS Sierra (10.12) and earlier; and MS-DOS (FAT) and ExFAT, which are compatible with the Windows operating system. Within each of these file system formats are subcategories, such as APFS (Encrypted) and Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

9.  To accept the changes select Apply and choose Partition.

10. The size of the Virtual Disk is extended.

 

Impact/Risks:

• Unable to boot up the Virtual Machine due to Insufficient Disk Space.
• Low disk space also might impact the performance of the Virtual Machine.
• Error taking snapshot: Failed to suspend the virtual machine.
• There is not enough disk space to save the virtual machine's state.
• Could not open the paging file for <X> MB. No space left on the device.
• Could not power on a virtual machine; No space left on device.